1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to a dialogical translation system for completing a correct translation in cooperation with a translation machine.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Recently, some translation systems for translating one original language into one or more other languages have been proposed.
Meanwhile, since the translation systems of this type have been developed mainly to improve the accuracy in translation, they are not well developed so as to be able to respond to various needs sought by users.
For instance, in one conventional translation system, an entry means for entering one or more sentences to be translated is limited to a direct data entry means such as a keyboard means and, in another type of translation system, it is limited to an indirect data entry means for reading sentence data stored in an external memory means such as a floppy disk. In other words, there has been no known translation system capable of selecting either the direct data entry means or indirect data entry means according to its necessity.
Also, in the conventional translation system, the translation mode is limited to a mode for translating one or more sentences in a unit of one sentence or to a mode for translating a lump of sentences in a package. Namely, there has been no translation system which is able to select either one sentence translation mode or a package translation mode according to its necessity.
Generally speaking, in the machine translation, it is inevitable that a plurality of possible translations are obtained since every language itself has some ambiguities. Therefore, it becomes necessary to display each possible translation obtained successively in order for a user to select the correct translation.
As an exammple, let us consider translations of three English sentences as follows:
(1) I had 300 dollars yesterday.
(2) I bought a car with 200 dollars today.
(3) So I have 100 dollars now.
Among these three sentences, sentences (1) and (3) have no ambiguity respectively, only one possible translation can be obtained and it might be correct. However, the sentence (2) has some ambiguities in the subordination as shown in FIG. 7. In this case, two possible translations may be obtained according to the subordination relations indicated by arrows P and Q respectively. In the translation system, first and second possible translations are displayed successively and the user will select the latter one obtained according to the subordination indicated by the arrow Q as a correct translation.
In such a machine translation, the following three needs may be essential to users.
(A) It is needed to obtain an outline of sentences in a short time without demanding high accuracy in translation. Accordingly, this requires a function being able to translate a lump of sentences in a package. In such a package translation, only the first possible translation of each sentence is output although one or more incorrect translations may be contained in the translations obtained.
(B) It is needed to obtain an exact translation although it is time consuming. In such a case, each possible translation is output successively to obtain a correct translation for every sentence.
(C) It is needed at first to grasp an outline by a package translation and then to correct translations supposed to be incorrect referring to the outline obtained. This may enhance the efficiency of translation as a whole.
As mentioned above, the conventional machine translation system is specialized to the mode (A) or (B) and is impossible to operate under the mode (C).